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Introduction:::...
There
are five different mounting positions on the top rail but
because the bracket holes are slotted this means the actual
positions can be infinitely adjusted from one end to the
other. For cooling the top surface of a graphics card you'll
probably be using this long top rail as the main bracket
is a touch short to use the shorter end rail, plus with
most recent high-end card the bracket will foul on the auxiliary
power feed.
As
I mentioned earlier you can, if you wish, mount two fans
side by side here too.
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Infinite
Top Bracket Positions
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One
one fan can be accommodated on the shorter end rail but
it has two mounding positions which, along with the slotted
holes, means infinite position fine tuning is possible.
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Multiple
End Bracket Positions
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With
the tendency for this end bracket to foul your graphics
card I'm guessing if you use it at all it'll be with it
slung below the main bracket and thus serving to cool your
hard drive cage.
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End
Bracket Installed
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The
single brackets are very flexible in terms of their position
and orientation but they would benefit from being pressed
slightly to increase their structural rigidity. Though they
hardly take a lot of strain they are perhaps a touch flimsy
and it would be very simple to press a few small, strategically
placed indents into the steel to help stiffen things up
a little.
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End
and Top Bracket Installed
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End
and Top Bracket Installed
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There
are five different mounting positions for single-fan fitting
on the main bracket or two can be installed side-by-side.
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Fan
Mounting Options
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Very focused areas of cooling can be created at the top
end of the bracket and the overall mounting flexibility
means there are a host of potential uses, from cooling the
North Bridge to bathing expansion cards, hard drives and
even MOSFETs in cooling air.
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Concentrated
Cooling
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My
only real gripes with assembling the 3D Slot Fan are to
do with the fans. To begin with, almost all fans have an
arrow on their sides to indicate the direction of airflow.
Unfortunately the blue plastic edge band used to hold the
LEDs and their wiring in place means that if there is such
an arrow on these fans it can't be seen.
I
can confirm that if you look at the fan with the feed wires
on top, the direction of airflow is from back to front.
I hadn't bothered to check this at the time of taking the
pictures so the fans are not necessarily mounted the correct
way round.
Another
fan-related issue is that you should ONLY mount the
fans to the main bracket with the motor support frame and
power wires on the back (i.e., the opposite way around the
the one in the above image). It's not an issue on the small
brackets which are completely open but on the main frame
there's enough play in the motor spindle when under gravity
for the fan blades to actually make contact with the small
struts between the pressed holes. This at best makes a horrendous
noise, at worst it may damage the blades or the motor. You
could add four small spacers but the screws are just barely
long enough as it is.
Because
the fans hang below the main bracket in a tower case, gravity
would usually keep the blades clear of the bracket but in
a horizontal desktop or SFF case I wouldn't chance it. In
fact I wouldn't chance it in a tower either but that's just
me.
The
final gripe, and this is a minor one, is that because the
bracket is painted you need to put a reasonable amount of
pressure on the screws to get the thread to bite. Not exactly
challenging but worth a mention.
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